Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

‘If you would like to have a glance,’ she said, ‘to see if you might wish to make use of them. They are in chronological order.’

  He took the first letter from the envelope. ‘… Until I saw you come into the room yesterday,’ wrote Lamprey, ‘I never understood the meaning of delight. I have never, until now, delighted. I have seen, since then, again and again, the door open and you walk in and my whole being has surged upwards. I cannot endure to wait until …’

  He put the letter down and looked at her.

  ‘Edward Lamprey and I,’ she said, a little stiffly, ‘loved each other for many years.’

  ‘Christ,’ said the girl. ‘How weird. I mean, how absolutely extraordinary. I bet you're thrilled.’

  ‘Hang on – I'll put another ten pence in. Hello? The thing is she won't let them out of the house which is fair enough but she's willing for me to make copies and thank God she's got an old typewriter so I can get going right away. She's extraordinarily helpful- set up a table for me and fussed round with electric fires and whatnot and now she's cooking us some sumptuous meal. Routed out some pyjamas, even.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see. So you won't …’

  ‘No. Not this weekend. And I wanted to see you. I've been thinking about it all day. Hello?’

  ‘Yes. I'm still here. Oh, well …’

  ‘Thursday was – just incredible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said Thursday was marvellous.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Wasn't it. I've been thinking too… Oh, bother. Never mind. How long do you think it'll take?’

  ‘I don't know. They're long letters. Actually, they're beautiful. The most beautiful letters I've ever read. Love letters. They're – oh God I can't explain. It's going to change the book entirely, finding this. It's changed Lamprey. I feel – oh, really involved for the first time. It's not just work any more, I actually care about him as a person. Oh, Christ, that's the last ten pence – look, I'll ring again tomorrow. O.K.?’

  She stood in the doorway with a towel over one arm, and a pair of blue and white striped pyjamas. ‘I got these out for you, Malcolm. I think they would be about the right size.’

  Lamprey's?

  ‘My brother,’ said Lucinda, ‘stayed here for several months before his death. Some of his things have not yet been cleared out.’ She looked in sudden doubt at the pyjamas. ‘But perhaps you would rather not. They have of course been laundered.’

  He held out his hand. ‘It's very kind of you. In fact the whole thing is extraordinarily kind. I can't tell you how grateful I am.’

  ‘It would be as well,’ she said, ‘to go to the chemist for the shaving things before they close. I thought we might take some sherry together at about seven, before we eat. There are one or two points I have thought of that may interest you.’

  There was sherry, good sherry at that, and whisky and gin and a soda siphon, magicked from heaven knows where in this surprising house. And Lucinda Rockingham wearing now some long velvet dressing-gown-like garment, looked pink and frail and yet, when it came to conversation, animated. And the Rayburn Maxistove had been lit and there was this extraordinarily good smell coming from the kitchen.

  It was midnight before he went to bed. She had left him at eleven or so and he had sat on looking through the bundle of letters he would copy out the next day and, finally, reading some of Lamprey's poems. The Cycle of the Year sequence, written shortly after he met Lucinda Rockingham and which, knowing what one now knew, took on a new meaning. Overhead, boards delicately creaked, and presently there was silence. Outside, the occasional car rustled through the rain. He put the letters away, went to bed, lay awake for a while consumed with erotic yearnings, and fell asleep to dream of Lucinda Rockingham bicycling once, as she had described, along the waterfront with Edward Lamprey. A dog had run in front of his bike, causing him to fall and sprain an ankle. He had walked back to the house supported by Lucinda's arm. They had known one another, at that point, Lucinda thought, six weeks or so. Malcolm felt, in his dream, the touch of Lucinda's hand upon Lamprey's arm; he walked, with Lamprey, in a blaze of love.

  ‘The amazing thing is,’ he said, ‘that they only saw each other at most every few months. Usually they met in London and every now and then he came down here. Her mother was alive then, and living with her so they weren't even alone that much if he came to the house. And then all the letters … Honestly, I wish I could … I'd love to read some of them to you. They're some of the best stuff he ever wrote.’

  ‘You certainly seem very involved in it all.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘At this minute. Apart from talking to me. So I can imagine.’

  ‘I'm looking out of the window. There's a white cat walking along the window ledge opposite. It's pouring with rain.’

  ‘It's chucking down here too. What are you wearing?’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ the girl said. ‘A sort of blue shirt thing. And jeans. How's it going – I mean apart from being good and all that – how much longer will it take?’

  ‘Another week at least. I can't see any way of getting through before.’

  ‘Oh, gosh,’ she said.

  He read and typed and the old lady brought him coffee and occasionally aspirin. Twice, they walked down to the sea, he with his hand hovering beside her arm across the roads. Edward Lamprey, she said, had loved to walk along the beach collecting driftwood. Yes, she said, the poem ‘Seashapes’ was written after such a walk and yes, she supposed the references were more particular than might be supposed. She talked of a concert at the Makings to which they had been together and of meetings in London, always with some shared activity in mind, visits to art galleries and places of interest and walks in Kew Gardens and Richmond Park. Lucinda Rockingham stayed with a cousin in Putney; Lamprey had a room in a friend's flat in Fulham which he used when in London. Each September they went to a Prom; in the spring they took the steamer to Greenwich.

  And the letters, one upon another, a passionate narrative of love and commitment.

  No, she said, we never travelled together. It would not have been possible. I had my mother to think of for many years; Edward took his family always to Cornwall. No, I never met his daughters; he talked of them a great deal, they were very close, I have a photograph of them when Marion was twelve and the others of course a little younger.

  Year after year; through autumns and winters and springs and summers; moving from one longed-for, hoarded time to another.

  She spoke of Lamprey's eclectic tastes, in music and in literature. She took down from the bookshelves the copies annotated in his hand, passages scored in the familiar red ink (‘He used the same fountain pen for twelve years’), observations scribbled in the margins (‘I have to confess that I never liked Edward's habit of defacing books, albeit with the best of intentions’). She peered into the intestines of the shining mahogany box in the corner, fiddled with slow crooked fingers, tutted and exclaimed, and produced, astonishingly, Duke Ellington and Sydney Bechet.

  The rain turned to sunshine and the sunshine fell in wide mossy shafts upon the growing pile of letters on the deal table in the spare bedroom.

  Upon gaiety and sadness and delight and regret. Upon eighteen years.

  ‘Soft lights and sweet music!’ said the girl. ‘New Orleans and Eartha Kitt! Well, I never! What's a radiogram, by the way? I must say, if she wasn't eighty I'd feel I'd been cut out.’

  ‘My head's spinning. I've been at it six hours on the trot. I got so absorbed I didn't even hear her bring me in tea. It got cold. The cucumber sandwiches went soggy.’

  ‘All this vicarious experience. I don't know …’

  ‘I had this dream about you last night.’

  ‘What was I doing?’

  ‘I couldn't possibly tell you. It was disgraceful.’

  ‘Now, now,’ she said. Winds sighed and whistled across four counties.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn't say anything.’
r />   ‘It's ten days,’ he said, ‘since Thursday. Ten days and – six and a half hours.’

  ‘Look,’ said the girl, ‘I know. Don't I know.’

  ‘When I see you, I'm just going to …’

  ‘I can't hear.’

  ‘It doesn't matter. At least it does. Darling.’

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Have a break for a day or two. Come to London. You could always go straight back.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I can't. I want to – goodness, I want to – but I can't. I'm right in the middle of it. You see there's something I just can't … There's an enormous thing I simply don't … Hello? Are you there?’

  Miss Rockingham, in the interests of literary history I have to ask you if your relationship with the poet was a physical one?

  Miss Rockingham, did you sleep with the man or did you not?

  Perhaps, he told himself, it doesn't matter. So far as the book is concerned, it need never be stated. Prurience, after all, is only an arm's length away. The letters matter; the relationship matters; let the rest be silence.

  But I need to know. For myself, not for the book. Because. Because I have read the letters and humbly experienced through them the feelings of Edward Lamprey and seen with the eyes of Edward Lamprey the woman he loved. Because I care.

  They sat up late, with the radiogram turned low, and Lucinda Rockingham opened a bottle of madeira, a relic of her brother. She poured the madeira into crystal glasses off which the lamplight snapped, and talked of the onset of Lamprey's illness, of an afternoon in London when she had, for the first time, understood that he was dying. An exhibition at the Tate, she said. She turned the glass in her fingers and light flew from it into the corners of the room. Chagall, I remember, and Kandinsky.

  ‘It seems a bit creepy to me,’ said the girl.

  ‘You see I honestly do not know. I think it's quite possible they didn't. Which makes it all the more remarkable. The letters. All of it.’

  ‘I don't mean them. I mean you.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You seem,’ she said resentfully, ‘to find them more compelling than real life.’

  He delved frantically in his pocket; the coin clunked. ‘Hello? It's O.K., I've put another one in … You sound cross. Please don't sound cross.’

  ‘I'm not,’ she said, ‘cross.’

  ‘Actually, I love you. What? I said, I love you.’

  ‘Oh …,’ she said at last. ‘Oh, Malcolm.’

  ‘And I keep thinking …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Oh, just … I keep thinking about us.’

  ‘You keep thinking,’ the girl said, ‘that we haven't been to bed together either?’

  The pile of letters diminished. Lucinda Rockingham, standing at his elbow with a proffered cup of coffee said, ‘Dear me, I shall soon be losing you. One more day? Two more days?’

  ‘Three, I think. Saturday should finish it. I'm never going to be able to thank you enough for all this.’

  ‘It has been a pleasure,’ she said graciously. ‘I've enjoyed your company. I lead a solitary life these days. It has done me good to talk. I hope I have not talked too much.’

  ‘Oh, goodness … I don't know quite honestly when I've been more fascinated. You've – well, you've just changed everything for me, so far as the book is concerned. I only hope you will be happy with it, eventually. That you won't um …’

  ‘Have any regrets?’ said Miss Rockingham. ‘I think not. I've thought it all over and am certain I made the right decision. It is what Edward would have wished. Now that his wife is no longer alive. So – Saturday will be our last evening together.’

  ‘Thank goodness you rang. I was so terrified you might not. Listen, the most incredible thing. You know that friend of mine – the girl who plays in an orchestra at Snape? Well, she's driving down on Saturday and she said why not come along? Several of them have got this cottage and there's a room I could have for the night.’

  ‘That's amazing,’ he said. ‘That's wonderful.’

  ‘So what do you think? Shall I …’

  ‘Is this room a big room?’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I think it is quite a big room.’

  There were seventeen letters left. He read them through, in order, one after another, until the last. The final three were written from the nursing home in which Lamprey died.

  There was no indication. Nothing to confirm, one way or another. Just as throughout.

  ‘A cup of tea,’ said Lucinda Rockingham. ‘Earl Grey this morning. Edward had leanings towards Earl Grey. A small point I had forgotten to mention.’

  He pulled the typewriter towards him, smoothing out the one-hundred-and-seventy-sixth letter.

  ‘We should hit Aldeburgh,’ the girl said, ‘at about six. So where shall we meet?’

  ‘I'll ring you at this cottage place. Does it have a number?’

  ‘Yes. Hang on. Here it is …’

  ‘O.K. I've got that. Sixish? Wonderful. Twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I know. I can't believe it.’

  ‘I can't either. Yes, I can. I'm about ten years older, incidentally. Since the week before last.’

  ‘Silly …’ she said. ‘How's it going, by the way?’

  ‘Practically gone. All tied up, nearly.’

  ‘Have you found out if …’

  ‘No.’ He looked through the glass of the phone box at grey sea marshalled beyond the sedate lamp-posts of the esplanade, at the back of a cast-iron bench, at the cold eye of a sea-gull. ‘No, I haven't.’

  ‘Does it still matter?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It does.’

  ‘Couldn't you ever so discreetly ask?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  ‘I have been thinking,’ said Lucinda Rockingham, ‘that in view of the fact that this is your last evening we might have a little celebration. I have ordered a duck from the butcher and I find that happily there is a bottle of what seems to be quite a nice wine in the storeroom.’

  ‘Oh … Oh, that's terribly kind but in fact as it happens a friend of mine …’

  ‘You were intending to stay overnight?’ ‘Well, I had been going to suggest actually that …’ ‘It has occurred to me that now you have read all the letters there may be one question that is bothering you.’ He stared at her – neat, old, bent, her eyes bright amid a soft tissue of wrinkles. ‘Well – yes. Yes, there is – there is something I had been wondering about.’

  ‘This evening,’ said Miss Rockingham. ‘This evening over our little celebration, I think might be a suitable time.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You've come. You're here. Did you have a good drive down?’

  ‘I think so. I hardly noticed. Where are you?’

  ‘In the phone box on the sea-front.’

  ‘Then you can drive over in about ten minutes. Look, I'll tell you how to get here, it's a turning off the coast road just after …’

  A sea-gull gawped at him again, from the wall, with a metallic eye. ‘I tried to ring you in London. You'd gone. You see, the thing is she says …’ The sea-gull raised its bill to the white sky and shouted; he could hardly hear his own words, his inexplicable inexcusable words ‘… so you see I must, I simply must. Shall I ring you say at eleven or so? She goes to bed then.’

  ‘I'm not sure,’ the girl said eventually. ‘That I'll be here. I may go over to Snape with Diana.’

  ‘Well, I'll try, shall I, all the same?’

  ‘You can try,’ she said.

  Miss Rockingham feared the duck was perhaps a little tough but thought the wine adequate. She allowed him to clear the table and moved with her still half-full glass into the sitting-room. She opened the front of the Rayburn Maxistove and stabbed energetically at the coals within. She sat down.

  ‘You have presumably wondered about the nature of my relationship with Edward Lamprey. We were never lovers. In the physical sense.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. Quite. I see. Not that I … There would really be no reason
to … For the purposes of the book.’

  ‘It was agreed between us. On account of his family. And now that that point is out of the way shall we have some music?’

  Later, much later, when she was in bed, he walked down to the phone box. Youths with motorbikes revelled on the esplanade, spilling from the pubs; a small white dog trotted purposefully past the darkened shop fronts; the sea slapped against a jetty. He dialled the girl's number. When it had rung a dozen times he put the receiver down and examined his feelings. He felt nothing, nothing at all. Just a faint regret, a pale decreasing sense of loss.

  What the Eye Doesn't See

  THE MISSES Knight, Joyce and Nora, on the threshold of old age, lived in a large Georgian house in Pershore, Worcestershire. Pershore is one of those medium-sized market towns that give an impression of slight detachment from the present, despite such normalities as supermarkets, petrol stations, and billboards. Something to do with the symmetry of eighteenth-century brick façades, perhaps, and side streets secluded from the thunder of through traffic. The Knights’ house, number seven St Joseph's Place, was in just such a side street, or cul-de-sac, rather, and here the detachment achieved was quite remarkable.

  There was little to tether the house to year or even decade: no recent electrical appliance or quickly identifiable piece of decor, no contemporary books, no magazines or periodicals. The Misses Knight had achieved a selective repudiation of the society in which they lived; they took what they wanted, such as Bendicks chocolates, Bath Oliver biscuits, main drainage, antibiotics and insecticides, the protection of the law and a constant supply of heat, light and water, and rejected the rest. What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over, they said; Nora and Joyce had trained the eye to see only what it wished to see, and the heart to restrict its concern. We know very little, they would say, about what is going on; we lead our own lives.

  They took The Times, of course, for the Hatches, Matches and Despatches, as Nora called them. She would run her eye carefully down the columns every day at breakfast, in search of a relevant name. ‘Someone called Lucy Symington got married. Do you think that could be anything to do with Molly Symington?’ They pondered. ‘A daughter couldn't be as young as that,’ said Nora. ‘Granddaughter if anything.’ Molly Symington had been at school with them. The address gave no clue; in any case they had not communicated for forty years. ‘A John Chalmers died. Eighty-nine. Weren't those people on holiday at Salcombe called Chalmers? The father, perhaps.’ Nobody had been born who could be linked in any way to their own lives. Joyce folded the paper up carefully, for consignment to the fire-lighting pile in the pantry.